


broken words, broken wings

by wanderlustlover



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Holes - Louis Sachar, Milliways, Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambergeldar, Community: milliways_bar, F/M, Gen, Multi, Plot: The Greatest Adventure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He stands in her silence. Letting her dictate now; all the rules and punishments that have to be followed. That can not be brooked, or rebelled against. As though somehow they've slipped roles entirely. Only months ago, breathing near her wasn't allowed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	broken words, broken wings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alemara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/gifts), [ladyoflorien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoflorien/gifts), [herdivineshadow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/herdivineshadow/gifts).



> Gabby said -- 'Marian & Guy: broken words, broken wings' and then it exploded. 
> 
> Takes place in The Greatest Adventure universe, wherein, due to a confluence of events/plans in Milliways, Marian survives her own death but cannot return to her world.

"Don't." It had only been one word. Fast, a little desperate, and wholly hard as nails. 

 

The only word she said when he'd finally shifted his shoulders and turned toward her, a hand on the long wooden fence. Finally. Finally, he could start somewhere. Any of the where's he hasn't been able to out run since she sent him packing from the infirmary.

It is not the only ghost he has of her. No, of those, there are hundreds. But that was the most recent real one. The closest he'd been until now. Her left hand, with the massive ruby one-third the size of it, clenched over the clean sharp rip in her bloodied white dress and the perfectly smooth skin under it, as she'd scrambled from the bed shouting, over the others trying to calm her or defend him, that either he was leaving the infirmary or she was. 

That part wasn't actually as bad as catching the full assault of her silent realization, after she'd blinked her eyes open. As she went from drowsy waking to how she knew, suddenly. That she was alive, and that everything else that once was, wasn't. The way her blue eyes had widened, in a flare of such dramatic pain, that felt worse than any of his memories of dying and only, very marginally, right under the debilitating the ones of killing her. 

 

When she'd lain there, rigid as the grave, and said he'd finally done it. 

He'd made her a wife, a widow, and taken everything she ever loved from her. 

That shaking, breaking voice. The one he'd heard only once before. Over her father.

Before she blinked, when he tried to reach out, and the yelling, to wake the dead, had started.

 

 

He stands in her silence. Letting her dictate now; all the rules and punishments that have to be followed. That can not be brooked, or rebelled against. As though somehow they've slipped roles entirely. Only months ago, breathing near her wasn't allowed. 

Only months ago, if he so much as set foot outside of the building during one of the few times she'd been willing to go outside, she'd flown as though his existence burned her. As though she, the girl who'd run for a King and stood still and let herself be all but killed, could not flee him fast enough. And she would be missing for days, then, or weeks.

To even question, to say anything, to her one word, would be to lose everything he has now. And if it is ten feet short of nothing, it is still ten feet he didn't have before these minutes. Before this place where he is standing within ten feet of her, watching the hard line of her jaw, still not looking at him, after she's spoken the first word he's heard her speak in enough months they are approaching the end of a second season, and the way her knuckles are white on the paddock post.

The wind is toying with her loose curls, blowing one across her cheek, and it could be any of the other days. Before all of this. Raven black against pale skin that has been more sun-kissed than court ladies liked. An ever present hint of her unbiddable spirit. Unbiddable now. Declaring him wordless with a single word. And he knows Caspian and Kate can't be far away, even if it weren't for the stable nearby.

He knows it will never be any of those other before-day even here in Milliways. He's the turncoat, who died for Robin Hood, but only after killing the thing he loved most. She's the woman who would have died for her king, even if it meant truly dying, who chose life. 

 

 

He doesn't know what happened to the ring. Or if, indeed, it was a wedding ring.

He doesn't know who it was that finally fished her out of the middle of the vast lake-ocean, where she bobbed, a dark blur in the center of that small white boat for almost the length of her whole first day back. Only that The Hope was moored the next day, and that he didn't see her or Caspian for nearly three weeks after that. 

He's seen her laugh, through windows, from a distance that seems almost greater this close, than it ever did having no idea where her body was lain to rest, with only the wind to scream his penance. He's watched the spring curve off the hardness of her shoulders. Even if he missed when she finally touched someone again.

She gravitated to the horses, the water, the people who were in the party on that blistering day in Acre, and he has to wonder if she's given up her position. He hasn't seen her badge or her on duty. But then she managed years without him noticing that, hiding it as well as she'd hidden The Nightwatchman, and she's going to and from somewhere, with long absences in-between, so he knows he's missing more than he's catching to begin with. 

He still keeps watching, like a candle that just can't give up vigil, that can't find a way to blow out.

 

It's not a compliment that they all know she'll come around. No. In their eyes it is pity and scorn, tangled with deep gratitude and loving hate. Too many emotions that make words run hot and cold, like leaky, twisted plumbing even when they talk to him, because they still do, even if she doesn't. Nothing in Milliways is ever simple, yet still.

What do you say to the man who ran a sword, silver white with the sun shining on it, straight through her, while she smiled at him and they all watched? What do you not say to the man, a year past his own death, who is the first, if not only, reason she is still alive?

He knows she's asked it, too. Knew she was the first time he looked up and found her in the same room with him. Again. Finally. The wide expanse of the bar seeming all at once like the square in Acre. Huge, blistering, and suffocatingly small. Studying him, with hard eyes, one hand on her hip and the other on the bar top. As thought the entire room and all its noise didn't even exist for her, the way it vanished entirely on her suddenly there again. 

An accusation of such deep betrayal and lasting sadness condiscended across fair features that refused to freeze or burn with fury. Like she can't hate him, or herself, enough to become another person on this side. That she cannot out run who she is, or have let it die on his sword running through her. He doesn't know if she remembers that. 

He'd hardly even gotten to considering standing, when she ignored the magically-appeared tea service and walked off through the painting of The Dogs Playing Poker, wrapping her light spring cloak around her like the room had suddenly become filled with the deep chill winter.

He knows there are no words to tell her that's part of what he loves about her, too. She had them all, in the straw, chained to a wall she refused to be released from, when he knew it might be the very last time. When all the bridges and moments they all prayed she might turn back, forget her door, and not walk, not run, to what was only a bare whisper of a promise of his worst nightmares, relived a second time.

She forgave him after her father. She forgave him after the house. She forgave him after he told her he was going to kill her. She's going to forgive him this. Whether she meant when she said she already had, before Acre, or will one day, far from now, he knows it actually doesn't change the broken bridges. It doesn't change who she is or where they've been. She never forgets. 

Not her. With her more gray than blue eyes, a walking storm in this summer. 

That she believes, she forgives, she sees the very best, even in the very worst places.  
Forgiving her has always been too easy, and he thinks -- he knows he learned that from her. 

 

But. This part. Living with himself, with herself, with what they've done, who they've become. 

 

 

There is no more Sheriff of Nottingham. There are no more people. There is no more Robin Hood. They are standing on the graves of a loop only Milliways could have made, where somehow she is the last person left alive. It isn't about living, as the minutes struggle past them, as blood slowly flows back into her fingers with color as she stops clenching the wood. 

It was never about living in Sherwood. It was about surviving. And they both did. And they both didn't. And maybe she won't forgive herself for forgiving him before it even happened. For being herself. For choosing herself. For living. For saving King Richard and not Robin Hood. 

But he can survive that, and this, this aching maddening silence, a ten foot chasm he won't try to breach with a word or a move, where he'll stand and watch, with some fierce determination to brand it into his mind, the way her shoulders still rise and falls with each breath coming into and out of her, and know that even if she doesn't. Forgive him. Speak to him. Look at him. Find a way out. 

It won't matter in the end. He'd still have chosen her, wanted her to live, even if it wasn't near him, as his. That he might have been a year late, at four months early, but he made the right choice this time, finally, and he wouldn't apologize for that, even if it broke them both.


End file.
